The Torah calls Noah a tzadik, a righteous person, a term not used casually in the biblical tradition, even to describe Abraham or Moses.
Rashi quotes the famous debate in the Talmud concerning the opening verse in our parsha: “Noah was a righteous man, perfect in his generation” [Genesis 6:9]. The Talmud [Sanhedrin 108a] questions: does the phrase ‘in his generation’ come to praise Noah, who would have been considered righteous in any generation, or [was it] only by comparison to the lowly people of his generation that Noah [was] considered righteous?”…
